1796 "A Letter
From The Right Honourable Edmund Burke To A Noble Lord on the Attacks Made Upon
Him And His Pension In The House of Lords by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of
Lauderdale, Early in the present Sessions of Parliament."

This was
one of Edmund Burke's last significant works, written and published in 1796 the
year before his death. In it Burke skewers the Duke of Bedford for hypocrisy in
questioning the King's grant of a pension to Burke and explains Burke's
opposition to the French Revolution and similar leveling movements in England,
thus saving the lands and lives of aristocrats like Bedford. Conor Cruise
O'Brien in the introduction to his thematic biography of Edmund Burke, "The
Great Melody," lists this as among Burke's works of highest eloquence that "is
in a special class of its own, but belongs to the general context of the French
debate."

This is one of my favorite works by Burke. He has this to say about France the
American Revolution and the English constitution:

Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostility was at
a good distance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost our
colonies, but we kept our Constitution.

And here is what Burke thinks of the "innovation" of the French
Revolution:

To innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists
complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left
nothing, no, nothing at all, unchanged. The consequences are before us,--not in
remote history, not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon
us. They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf
the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they
stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our
business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are saddened, our
very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than
ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation.

The Duke of Bedford, is a very rich nobleman, with much property
to protect, and Burke makes clear that Burke rather than Bedford is protecting
Bedford's interests against the lawless philosophers of France:

The
Duke of Bedford will stand as long as prescriptive law endures,--as long as the
great, stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are
kept in their integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws,
maxims, principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution. They are secure
against all changes but one. The whole Revolutionary system, institutes, digest,
code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the
very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the laws on which civil life
has hitherto been upheld in all the governments of the world. The learned
professors of the Rights of Man regard prescription not as a title to bar all
claim set up against old possession, but they look on prescription as itself a
bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to
be no more than a long continued and therefore an aggravated injustice... as
long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land,--so
long the mounds and dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to
fear from all the pickaxes of all the levelers of France.

The 1796
pamphlet has no wrappers or half title and is soiled on the outside as shown
above from 200+ years of age and use but
the inside is in pretty clean condition as shown by the picture below of it
opened up. It is 80 pages and measures about 5 x 8 inches and looks like it may
have been removed from a bound volume.

Price: $75

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